You probably know that a good brine can keep meat flavorful and moist. But why exactly does brining work, and what's the best way to do it if you don't have a lot of time? This video from the team at Chow and Modernist Cuisine explains both, and offers up a technique called "injection brining" that'll change the way you cook.

The science of brining is pretty straight forward, and explained in more detail in the video. When you dissolve salt into water, it dissociates into sodium ions and chloride ions, positively and negatively charged, respectively. Those ions then diffuse into the food, and the chloride ions specifically attach to the protein filaments in the meat, giving them a slight negative charge. Those filaments repel, leaving room for the sodium-rich water to come in and hang around.

Now normally brining takes hours, sometimes days if you really want it to work well, but the Modernist Cuisine team came up with a method that takes much less time, and preserves the crispy skin you might like on a roast chicken, turkey, or even Christmas goose. Just grab a flavor injector—you know, the ones you can get at the grocery store pretty cheaply. Instead of injecting into the meat from the outside, use a brine in the syringe and inject from the inside, directly into the muscle of the bird, an inch or so apart from each injection, without breaking through to the skin. It's faster than traditional brining, makes the meat almost as moist, and lets the skin crisp up nicely.

For a more detailed description of how injection brining works, watch the video above, or hit the link below. The recipe for that injectable brine is there as well.